Community Engagement

Friends, I’d like to ask you to mark your calendars for an event early in the fall. It’ll take some doing to get to for some of our non-retirees especially, but it’s worth it.

There are lots of ways to pray. The ones we’re most familiar with are us asking God for stuff. This is good and helpful. But it’s only one way to pray. There are many more. One alternative is what’s often called “contemplative” prayer. It has more to do with attending to who God is. If prayer requests are an effort to improve the world… Read more

Friends, if you’ve been in our sanctuary recently, I hope you’ve noticed our heritage cabinet on our eastern wall, not far from the entry to the atrium. There, our own Charles Sweetman has been gathering mementos, photos, articles, and memories from our history. He has done this with seasonable appropriateness: first Christmas, then Valentine's, then St. Patrick, then Easter, and perhaps more that I missed. His displays have been beautiful, poignant, funny, and profound.

These displays show us a church that is… Read more

“Hey Jaclyn, we want to do something fun, what should we do?”

I noticed this sort of request to our own Jaclyn Didiano early in my time at TEMC. The staff would be gathered at the church or elsewhere. We’d have time to kill. And Jaclyn would alleviate our boredom. Soon we would be playing some game or icebreaker, something Jaclyn accrued from her years in camping or recreation. Ice would be broken. Laughs laughed. Tears shed. Humans humanized.

You probably know Jaclyn… Read more